John C. Calhoun and Roger Taney were NOT Confederates
Wokeness Turns Mass Media’s Truthiness Problem Into Outright Distortion — OPINION
In the ongoing HISTORY WARS (POP! POP! POP! go the guns ’n’ weasels) it’s amazing what mass media gets wrong when it is out to promote “truthful” woke history. The truth is always a stretch with press organs riddled ny truthiness.
For year now, white evangelicals with the zeal of the newly converted have bombarded (POP! POP! POP!)of social media the meme Critical Race Theory is an innocuous movement that simply wants the “truth” of American history taught in schools. With history such as the New York Times flawed 1619 Project and the declaration that two United States citizens who never pledged fealty to the Confederate States of America were “Confederates,” one is reminded of the opening line of Roger Bacon’s essay “On Truth.”
“What is truth? a Jesting Pilate asked, but did not stay for an answer.” — Roger Back, “Of Truth”
(For you folks with post-secondary degrees wondering why I would be writing about a physical fitness system in a piece of two 19th Century scoundrels, all I have to say is, “It’s a Beautiful World” — for you.)
But what the hey, eh? The Great Boobisie doesn’t read the works of professional historians, so why should journalists? Most even don’t read the made-up pseudo-history crafted by the journos, like Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, the master’s degree bearing Pulitzer Prize winner who demanded immediate tenure from the University of North Carolina despite lacking a terminal degree (such as a PhD or an Ed.D) and teaching experience.
Such a grant of tenure based on such a record just isn’t done. But she persisted, got it, then dumped it. A history maker, she. Just like her 1619 Project.
No . The Great Booboisie circa 2021 gets its history from soundbites from video talking heads, or from the sluglines and opening paragraphs of online “content.”
The Great Booboisie reads, “Juneteenth Marks the End of Slavery” and unthinking accepts it. That the factoid behind a U.S. holiday frogmarched into being in record time is not true deters none of the Boobisie or their tribunes in the press. It was the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, and slavery still legally existed in parts of the United States after the Union Army’s liberation of slaves in Texas in 1864— the genesis of this demimyth-taken-as-fact.
The feedback loop of the content creators and media manipulators is super-powerful now that more than a generation of so-called “human beings” have had the neuronal networks of their brains wired by engagement with communications devices using algorithms pioneered by the gaming industry. Further use of social media/mass media by these communication devices deepens the conditioning, creating a Human Condition of which I can confidently state:
I believe any American under the age of 50 is a robot bereft of free will.
The mass media’s awakening of white America to the exigencies of the new black revolution in record-repealing rapid time was startling, unless you understand that the mass of these so-called “human beings” essentially are programmable robots.
As an O’Brien in This Oceania of Our Time, you can put out a historical event of uncertain provenance and it gets lapped up like booze spilled in the gutter on Election Day in front of Edgar A. Poe’s favorite gin mill.
The Freedmen’s Bureau calendar was marked for Jubilee Day celebration, nut it expired at the time Union Army hero U.S. Grant was thumping the tub to justify his second four-year occupation of the White House (1872). Emancipation Day in Texas likely was a marketing plot to inveigle “so-called Negroes” — to use the Hon. Elijah Muhammad’s phrase — to go to the Texas State Fair. It happened during the Great Depression, where everybody’s money was welcome and black folk’s money then wasn’t held in banks but buried behind a house or hidden under floorboards — so the wily White Man resorted to many tricks to sweat or inveigle that hidden money out of them.
Who gives a damn if Juneteenth did or did not exist? Who cares that it didn’t abolish slavery. What fascinated me is that this demimyth was turned into a national holiday in the space of — oh, what would you say? 90 days?
Confederate Statues Removed from Capitol
Now, the media is ballyhooing the removal of Confederate statues from the Capitol. House Votes to Purge Confederate Statues From the Capitol bleats the New York Times.
Well, two of those statues are John Calhoun of South Carolina and Roger Taney of Maryland. Neither one was a Confederate, and both were among the more significant Americans of the 19th Century whose actions shook this country to its core — But what does the truth in the sense of empirically validated reality matter in these Daze of the Triumph of Truthiness? Empirical reality is just the White Man’s Stratagem to keep Black Folk on the Plantation, the blue-eyed devils.
Let’s face it: The New York Times certainly doesn’t give a flying f#@% about History with a capital Aitch, unless they can reposition it as a vehicle for woke propaganda.
John C. Calhoun died in 1850, 11 years before states of the Slavocracy began seceding from the Union and Abraham Lincoln launched the War of the Rebellion (the official name of the Civil War in the 19th Century). How can a f — in’ guy who never lived to see the foundation of the country he allegedly is part of be a part of that country?
What is this? One of those Abraham Lincoln vs. The Living Dead potboilers hawked in the discount bin at Barnes & Noble? I guess, in a way, it was just that as the Big John C.’s ghost did stalk the battlefields and legislatures on both sides of the Mason Dixon line during the Rebellion.
Calhoun was a colossus of the Senate and one of the titans of U.S. history, whether you like him or not. Calhoun was despised by Andrew Jackson, whose vice president he was, and lamented that he didn’t have him arrested, tried for treason and executed.
In my opinion, the guy was a son-of-a-bitch and the country would have been better off if Jackson had hanged him. Yet, the political philosophy he crafted is part of the history of these United States, right now. It’s not one I like, but it’s existence can’t be denied.
Is this why the Woke and the Democrats want to remove the existence of its author?
Author of the Worst Supreme Court Decision Ever
Roger Taney, who as an aging (he was still going at it when he croaked at the age of 87) likely senile Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote the infamous Dress Scott v. Sanford decision when he was a stripling of 80, still full of piss and vinegar. Dredd Scott is as badly reasoned and factually incorrect as a Supreme Court decision can be. The old racist swine’s blacks including free blacks aren’t citizens and never were citizens” decision — more a ukase than anything — even outranks the rank and foul Plessy v. Ferguson decision of separate but equal passing constitutional muster.
It’s the worst Supreme Court decision ever, and Abraham Lincoln ran for President with the position that it wasn’t settled law and he would ignore it. That certainly got the Southern acolytes of Calhoun’s longjohns in a twist!
The elderly Roger Taney had morphed into one of the Biggest Assholes in American history — YES! — but Abe Lincoln’s original favorite whipping boy (before Jeff Davis) was never a citizen of the Confederate States of America.
Drawing on the philosophy of the man who brought him into the Big Time, Andrew Jackson, the old crocodile was of the opinion that secession was unconstitutional, but that the federal government didn’t have the right to use force to keep a seceding state in the Union.
On the latter part of his reasoning, he likely was correct. Franklin Pierce, the only favorite son my native New Hampshire sent to the White House, faced the same dilemma. A Jeffersonian Democrat, Granite State Frank thought the Union was something holy, just like “Uncle” Andy Jax; but he differed with the “Remarkable Andrew”* as threatening to use force to keep the Slavocracy in the Union on the early 1850s was unthinkable.
Slavery was constitutional. It was written into the Constitution and that was part of the compromise that was reached in Philadelphia, to create these United States from areas with differing economies and philosophies. A de facto coup d’etat that got rid of the old United States of the Articles of Confederation, there weren’t many Founding Fathers who believed that the Union was eternal. The idea of it collapsing seemed logical.
But let’s cut the chit-chat and get back to the heart of the matter:
During Mr. Lincoln’s War, the “Confederate” whose statue is to be removed from the Capitol, Roger Taney, was a citizen of the United States and served as — Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, as he had for 25 years before the Confederate States of America was constituted, and as he was for another three years afterwards.
Does the New York Times possess some skinny on Taney, about him renouncing his American citizenship, pledging fealty to the CSA, and spying for Jefferson Davis that it refuses to share? Is an 1861 Project to follow?
Roger Taney the Old Fart was despicable, but he was one of the major figures of his time. He served as Secretary of the Treasury and Attorney General for Andrew Jackson, who finally placed Taney’s ass in a Supreme Court seat (the Chief Justiceship) on his third try, the previous two nominations having been rejected by the Senate.
That Taney replaced Thomas Jefferson’s despised (by Jefferson) first cousin John Marshall, was particularly sweet. Marshall was the last of the Federalists that Jeffersonian Democrats fought and defeated. (Cockeyed John Adams even had the idea of using the impasse of the 1800 election in putting Marshall, his secretary of state, in the White House as his successor, which was a pipe dream. Instead, he named his Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in a recess appointment. The House of Representatives had to sort that one out, as the Constitution’s presidential election machinery it ordained was flawed (and still is).
During the eight years of President Jackson’s two terms, both the man who gave birth to Jacksonian Democracy and the old crocodile of the future, Roger Taney, may very well have been characterized as progressives by today’s meme artists who proclaim Eisenhower a great liberal, as they were against the power of corporations.
It was Roger Taney and his Court that stopped the law from overtly protecting corporations and the monopolies many of them enjoyed.
Taney guided his Court into reducing the absolute suzerainty corporations had over the economic life of the United States, a vestige of Hamiltonianism. They Taney Court opened up corporations to being regulated by the state.
Jacksonian Democracy Takes it on the Chin
Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party vastly increased democracy in the United States. Ranked as one of the greatest of all presidents until the ascendency of politically correct thinking (the term politically correct comes from CPUSA Marxist study groups of the Great Depression Era), the Remarkable Andrew was for quite a long time considered the father of modern democracy in America.
He was acknowledged as the father of the Democratic Party, until his slaveholding past and aggression against Native Americans put him beyond the pale politically by the time Arkansas Billy Clinton became just the fourth president from the old Rebel States to settle his ass into the catbird’s seat in the Oval Office since Andrew Johnson did his damndest to f#@% up Lincoln’s legacy. (Johnson got impeached for defying Congressional Republicans over the reconstruction of the South, whereas his fellow Rebel Clinton got nailed for using a White House intern as a humidor and sperm receptacle — and lying about it.)
John Calhoun and his supporters were behind the threat of South Carolina to secede from the Union. To Jackson, Calhoun was a traitor. To the day he died, he faulted himself for not having Calhoun put to death.
About executing Calhoun, Jackson said, “My country, would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come.”
Modern Democrats have turned their backs on Andrew Jackson, who was Harry S Truman’s favorite president. His embrace by the ignoramus (and ex-Democrat) Donald John Trump, on the advice of Steve Bannon, certainly didn’t help Jackson’s reputation.
It had been a long-time since such a pillar of liberal America, historian and Kennedy presidency chronicler Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., cited Andrew Jackson as the father of modern American democracy and a precursor to FDR and the New Deal.
The move to take Jackson off of the $20 bill and replace it with Harriet Tubman was derailed by Donald Trump. That will likely be the next chapter in Woke Iconoclasm.
NOTES
*The appellation “Remarkable” was given the slave-holding Indian-killer Andrew Jackson by Communist Party-USA member Dalton Trumbo — a member of the Hollywood 10 member — in a post Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact novel written under Party discipline. The Remarkable Andrew was anti-British, which made him ideal for crafting propaganda with a straight-from-Moscow-dictated bent, as Trumbo’s Uncle — Uncle Joe Stalin — was playing pattyfingers with Adolf Hitler and thus the British were taboo. When Britain became the USSR’s ally after the German invasion, Trumbo had the book taken off the market.
